Rock hard r'n'b & social commentary from FZ, stripped of the knowingly ironic lyrics for which he is better known.
Blow your harmonica, son!
Those first few LPs with the Mothers are peerless: witty and scabrous lyrics, tremendous geetars, and a wide palette of musical influences from avant skronk jazz to the sweetest doo-wop.
Seems odd to me that Zappa's music was often so sophisticated that it was beyond the ken of a large section of his audience, who nevertheless found much to enjoy in the schoolyard scatology of his lyrical subject matter.
I know what I'm talking about here, because the Zappa stuff which first appealed to me Jim and Ady was Joe's Garage (sex with machines, pliant Catholic girls) and 'Bobby Brown', 'Dinah Moe Hum', 'Dirty Love', and other trouser-orientated material...
It's sometimes hard to avoid the conclusion that Zappa's entire career was an extended pisstake of his audience as well as the wider American public. As an example, one of his most popular concert tunes was 'Titties and Beer', superficially a celebration of, well, breasts and and beer, but actually an adaptation of Stravinsky's 'L'histoire du Soldat'.
The least you can say of Zappa is that he was his own man, he did whatever the fuck he wanted, whether that was a four minute throwaway song about 'the Jazz Discharge Party Hats' or a triple album of guitar solos ('Shut Up and Play Yer Guitar' - Jim bought it on vinyl!)
He created a genre of his own, no one makes records which sound like Zappa except hisself...
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